It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. In fact, it’s been about three months. That wasn’t deliberate. I can promise you all that I have tried and tried to write something over these last three months. But every time I started writing something, I looked at it and it was just a mess. Maybe that’s kind of reflective of how I’ve been these last few months. I may not have looked it on the outside, but I’ve been drained. My creative energy which I’ve done my best to exhibit here through my writing for many years has been drained, sapped, on the brink of death. And that has been incredibly painful.

These last three months, or really six months, have been some of the most challenging I’ve faced. I do wonder if maybe, after having a renewal in faith last year, I was due for some trials and maybe a bit of suffering. I’m not going to lie, I haven’t borne it as well as I should have. It’s been a struggle at the best of times. I have battled with myself, my mind, my heart, and, in all honesty, with God. I have wrestled with God, struggling to trust, wondering why.

I think the ‘why’ question is probably one of the most significant and yet unanswerable questions we ever ask. And we all ask it. Why? Why now? Why me? Why this? Why is this allowed to happen? Why did this happen? Why can’t it be different? Why can’t this change? Why couldn’t it have happened differently? Why am I here? Why am I on this path? Why are bad things allowed to happen? Why must we suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people?

That last one is probably one of the biggest questions we as rational human beings have.

Philosophers ask why all the time. There’s a bit of a joke that you should never ask a philosopher ‘why’ because they’ll go on forever. The thing is, we ask ‘why’, but there will never truly be an answer – not in this world. The answer to this question lies beyond this world. 

I have spent countless hours these last three months, these last six months, wondering why about a lot of things. The answers have evaded me for months and probably for good reason. But I think there are lessons to be learnt, and so I’d like to share a few thoughts now that I’ve got my head back on relatively straight.

Never take the moments of joy that come your way for granted. Seriously, this is important. In the times when you are enduring struggles and seemingly immense challenges in your life, these moments of joy will give you the energy to keep going. When you are in them, cherish them – try not to think about everything that’s ahead, just live in the moment. That can be hard, but it’s worth it. Because we can get so caught up in the worries of tomorrow that we miss out on the joys of today. And if we miss those moments, the struggle will just be worse.

The power of community is something else. I think this has really struck me the last few months while I’ve been battling through my own struggles. If I didn’t have the people that I do around me, I don’t think I would have managed to keep going to the extent that I did. I am so grateful for my people, who make me want to push on and keep going, who give me the drive to pursue the good not only for my own sake, but for all of them too.

At times it can feel like everything is being taken from you. All that you hoped for, all that you worked towards, all that you desired, all that you have been building is swept out from under you. It seems like every door is being closed, every window shut, and there is no way out. But while I have wrestled with God, what I have come to realise is that I would not be able to get through anything without Him. While I may struggle, while this life may be hard at times, I would not want to do it without Him. And so springs forth from my mind the greatest realisation of all:

While everything else in this world can be taken from me, the only thing that cannot be taken is God. The only person who can remove God from my life is me.

This is it. This is what we all need to come to realise. Because everything can get hard. We’re all going to go through seasons of pruning. We’re all going to be faced with challenges that we are all going to have to deal with in one way or another. Sometimes we may be able to handle them head-on. But sometimes the best we can do is endure. And sometimes even that is a challenge. Sometimes enduring can be difficult. Sometimes it can be exhausting. Sometimes it is all we can do to just get through another day.

Some days we can become so overwhelmed by everything. We can struggle to make sense of what’s happening in our lives. We can struggle to understand it. Some days God is right in front of us, right there in the Blessed Sacrament, and yet it feels like He is so far away. 

Some days we go to pray and we don’t even know what to say anymore. And yet just a few months earlier prayer was no issue. But I think it’s at this point that we realise that maybe our prayer had become incredibly formulaic. That is not to say it was not still prayer, that it was not still valid and true, but that it was more just repetitious. It wasn’t necessarily a meaningful conversation with God.

What I have come to find over these last three months is that the most meaningful conversations with God seem to take place in moments of raw emotion. Sometimes in our darkest moments, in moments where we are all but ready to give into the spiral and turn to despair – these are the moments in which we must turn to God, even if we have to force ourselves to. Even if we feel like every prayer we make is not being heard, even if we feel like every door we attempt to run through is being closed, even if we feel like God is distant, we should still go to Him.

When we are upset, when we are angry, when we are on the verge of despair, when we are struggling with the weight of everything, like it’s all just crashing down upon us, like it’s all just caving in, we should run to God. We should talk to Him, even if our conversation is laden with the most raw emotions. He wants us to be real. He wants us to be honest. He wants us to be genuine about how we’re feeling. He doesn’t want us to be living a lie. He doesn’t want us to come to Him pretending everything is ok when it isn’t. He loves us too much to accept such a lie.

I think it’s timely that I write and publish this reflection this week for two reasons.

The Gospel this Sunday for the 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time focuses on rest. We hear Jesus speaking to the Apostles upon their return from being sent out:

The apostles rejoined Jesus and told him all they had done and taught. Then he said to them, “You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while”, for there were so many coming and going that the apostles had no time even to eat.

This highlights an important truth that we all really need to reflect on. We can get so caught up in the busyness of life, be it work, study, ministry, or whatever else occupies our time, that we forget to take time to rest. While we can often keep going and going and going, we tend to do so at our own expense. We can become so used to pushing on that we can easily become exhausted, and while we may push on, we end up unable to put in as much effort as we might hope, because our energy is so depleted that we physically, or more often mentally, cannot contribute so much effort.

We are no longer living, we are merely surviving.

It is so important for us to find moments of rest. Rest allows us to refocus, re-energise, and refuel. Ministry, work, study, and everything else we fill our lives with are not unimportant, and we are by no means neglecting them by resting. In fact, we will be better able to undertake these areas of our lives with rest than if we continued without it.

But while rest is important, there is a far greater reason for which this reflection is as timely as it is. And it’s something I think is so beautiful and yet so hard for so many of us.

Over the last three months, throughout all the struggles and challenges I’ve been dealing with, one small part of Matthew’s Gospel has kept on popping up. It’s a few lines from Jesus’ preaching. 

But before I quote them, I would like to ask you, the reader, to do something for me. As you read these words, imagine Jesus is speaking them directly to you. Forget everything else that’s going on around you. Forget all the noise of the world. Tune out of it all for just a moment and let your mind, heart, and soul focus on Jesus as He speaks these words to you:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Take a moment and read that again. If you need to, feel free to pause reading this here to just take in those words. Because they are everything. They are more than I could ever say. They are more than any words I write could ever convey, could ever do, could ever inspire.

Over these last three months, these words have presented themselves in one way or another at some of my darkest moments – moments where I was beginning to give up on hope, where I felt like God wasn’t listening, where He couldn’t be further away from me. 

It was almost providential that this section from Matthew’s Gospel just happened to be the Gospel reading on the day that this chapter came to a close.

It should be easy to just give everything over to God, to give everything over to Jesus, and take rest in Him, right? It would seem that way. But we so often struggle to do this. It is so difficult to give it all to Him.

It is so beautiful that Jesus speaks these words to us. It is so wonderful that Jesus wants us to come to Him and take on His yoke. And yet this is so incredibly hard for us to do. Everything we are shouldering, every worry, fear, anxiety, doubt, all that is weighing us down, it is so hard to give up. I think it can often come down to a sense of wanting to be in control. It’s not that we are controlling or that we just want to control everything. We don’t want to control everything because that would be overwhelming and exhausting. But we also don’t want to give up control of everything in our lives, because then we would feel like we have no control over anything at all.

We often struggle to cede control of everything because it can induce a fear within us that certain scenarios will play out that are not what we are hoping for – that everything will just go wrong, that all we are hoping for will crash and burn and that we will be left broken. 

But shouldering those burdens, carrying around all the struggles we are facing, dealing with all the anguish, the anxiety, the worries of everything that could go wrong, the fears of what the future could look like – it’s so exhausting. It’s so tiring.

I think that’s what really hit me these last few months. My mind was racing constantly with thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears, worries about the future, about getting my life in order, about worst case scenarios. I was thinking so much, getting so caught up in considering everything that could go wrong. 

And I realised that I was so tired. 

To be honest, I don’t know how I kept going sometimes. I was so emotionally, mentally, and spiritually drained. But my body just kept moving. Physically, I was able to go on. I wasn’t sure it would ever come to an end, at least not soon.

And all I could ask God for was peace.

For me, my life began to turn around when I finally realised my calling. But it all really began to come together when I went away on a weekend retreat with an amazing group of young Catholics a couple of weekends ago. That retreat brought me back to life. For too long I felt like a shell of myself, like I was not living but only surviving. After that retreat, I felt alive for the first time in at least three months, possibly even six.

Following that retreat, everything began to come together. While there had been a couple of setbacks in getting onto the path to which I was being called, I finally found my way there. And it all culminated in those incredible words of Jesus being proclaimed on Thursday.

I finally found peace. And what I have now come to realise is that there is a strangely ironic fundamental truth to reaching this point:

Sometimes we must endure pain to find peace.

My peace was not found in myself, but in Jesus and the people He has brought into my life and surrounded me with. I would not have been able to get through these last few months without them. It’s funny how it took going through this season of pruning to really draw close to the people who help me to grow. If it wasn’t for them, I’m not sure where I would be right now. 

Actually, if it wasn’t for them I don’t think I would have realised my calling. I say this with truth and confidence because it is the very people who I am surrounded by in community that have inspired my decision to pursue a career in Secondary Teaching. I am now on a path to teaching both English and Religious Education. It is through the work I have done in Youth Leadership at my Parish that I have realised just how important it is for our young people to be provided with opportunities to learn about and encounter Jesus. I want to see every young person given such opportunities. And it is my hope that in pursuing this career I will be able to bring the faith to so many others, to share it with so many young people, and to provide them with every opportunity possible to know Jesus, to encounter Him, and to grow closer to Him in every moment of every day.

And just a note: it never ceases to amaze me to see how faith-filled our youth are at the Parish that I feel privileged to be a part of. In an age where so many young people are consumed by the pillars and vices of the secular world, it is so wonderful, so inspiring to see just how dedicated the young people at this Parish are to their faith.

It is so wonderful, so beautiful, so powerful to be able to say that I am no longer just surviving – I am now living. I feel alive, and I’m ready to start taking leaps of faith with Jesus guiding me along the way. I know I can trust Him, and I know I can find rest in Him whenever I need it.

And so I want to encourage you all to do likewise. Whatever you are going through, whatever challenges you are facing, whatever worries, doubts, fears, and anxieties you are struggling with, whatever burdens you are shouldering, whatever pain and suffering you are enduring – bring it all to Jesus. Run to Him. Talk to Him. Even if you just want to let out all your emotions, there is no better place to do it then at a church, in a Chapel, in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

While there may be challenges, while things may get hard, while it might seem the world is collapsing in on you, remember and take heart in the fact that there will be an end to this – it will not go on forever (even though it often may seem like it will). Remember that while everything else in this world can be taken from you, the only person that can remove Jesus from your life is you. So, if I was to offer one piece of advice, it is this: run to Adoration, and know that Jesus is with you always. Start with that, and peace will come.